ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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Orzel-w informed me today that the reason none of his Photobucket jpegs work anymore is because Photobucket has changed its policy.

No more free rides . . .

Now its users have to pay $399.99 annually to host images which can be view on 3rd party sites like All Sci-Fi. I'm going to have to pay for this upgrade if I want to keep all my images working here.

Read more about this tragic decision here at PetaPixel.

For those of you who don't have thousands of images on Photobucket like I do, you might be able to reload the ones you have on Photobucket to another host and use the new links to repair your posts.

IMGUR is one I've used sometimes. Check it out.

I hope this won't discourage too many of our members from posting here and including great images. Rest assured, however, that I'm going to swallow my pride (and $400 annual) to keep All Sci-Fi alive and well.

Bud
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Gord Green]

With all the problems I've had with Photobucket I've been using Hostpic lately. I find it easy and so much faster. I save my pics on a backup hard drive with 3 terabites of memory that cost me about 60$.

[bulldogtrekker]

I haven't been notified yet but that is terrible news. I have all of my Star Trek cosplay at Pinterest but all of my other photos are stored at Photobucket. I use Photobucket to post photos to All Sci-fi.

[Bud Brewster]

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If we loose all those cosplay pictures because of Photobucket, your two threads will be badly damaged!

Quick, go out right now, knock over a liquor store, and then sell a kidney! Do that and you can pay those bloodsuckers their ransom money!
_________________
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[bulldogtrekker]

I received the Photobucket notice today; it must be going to people with free accounts first. The notice is deceptive because the notice does not mention the $399.99 cost in the message. In fact, it took effort to find the $399.99 figure.

To go from $0 to $399.99 is idiotic.

Here is a MSN story about Photobucket.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/photobucket-users-upset-over-dollar400-ransom/ar-BBDOnaq

[MetroPolly]

I heard about this on the CHFB, and I'm totally appalled.

LIke I told them, try switching to Google Drive, I think they offer free storage, or at least they charge WAY less after a certain point.

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

I have 13,683 images on Photobucket, most of them posted here on All Sci-Fi among my 6,749 posts.

We have over 40 art and photo galleries, most created by me, and some created by Bogmeister, with those images on his own Photoshop account.

I can start using IMGUR for my jpegs (I have an account), but it would take me months to replace the thousands of Photobucket images I have on All Sci-Fi with IMGUR versions!

I see no alternative but to pay Photobucket their damn blood money to prevent them from gutting the picture-rich message board I've worked so hard to maintain.

Damn those sorry ass sons-a-bitches.

However, on Photobucket's Facebook page, one user posted this excerpt from Photobucket's announcement.



Since I've had one of the lower priced Plus Accounts for years, this apparently means I won't have to start paying the $399.99 until November 25th 2018, when that account is scheduled for annual renewal.

By the way, THIS is the moron who decided to charge Photobucket subscribers $400 a year to post the images in their own accounts -- even the PAYING subscribers like me - on blogs, message boards, eBay, Amazon, etc.

Folks, meet the idiot who is killing Photobucket, Mr. John Corpus, the CEO who joined the company just 18 months ago!


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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Custer]

I don't see the point of a PhotoBucket account if you can't post pictures it hosts on forums and websites - and $400 a year seems a ludicrously high price to pay, particularly as that policy could easily see them out of business during the twelve months in question.

Let us hope that my images survive until the end of next year. Meanwhile, while PhotoBucket has been having its problems, and isn't an approved image host at one forum I contribute to, some of my pictures have been hosted at postimage.org... which seems, I recently discovered, to be a "safe for work" offshoot of pixxxels.org, which has that "xxx" in its name for good reason. Not that they work properly all the time, sigh... I must check out Imgur, I guess!

[Gord Green]

Forgive the C&P, but I thought this was of interest.



https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/big-lesson-learned-photobuckets-ransom-images-debacle-191026772.html

The big lesson from Photobucket's ransom images debacle

Rob Pegoraro Fri, Jul 7 12:10 PM PDT


A major photo-sharing site is altering the deal. Pray it doesn't alter it any further.

Unfortunately for Photobucket, it didn't have a Darth Vader level of leverage when it recently started asking users to switch to a $400-a-year plan if they wanted to keep embedding their images on other sites.

This Denver-based firm's more likely fate: serving as a lesson to others about the risks of an ad-based business modeland about how not to pivot to a different financial footing.

Getting thumbnailed

Photobucket broke the news of this change to its users in about the worst way possible: by breaking links and erasing images embedded on third-party pages, both popular options when the site launched in 2003.
As irked British stamp-collecting blogger Ian Billings wrote June 30, Photobucket images embedded in a philatelic forum had all been replaced with the same thumbnail graphic of a maxed-out gauge and the caption Please Update Your Account To Enable 3rd Party Hosting. He labeled it a new sort of ransom.

The only heads-up provided to users seems to have been a cryptic June 26 post on Photobucket's blog that said We have updated our Terms of Service, effective June 20, 2017 and advised reviewing those new policies as they may affect your account.

I didn't get an email about the new terms at either of two long-dormant Photobucket accounts. Most users seem to have been just as surprised, to judge from their outraged tweets.

The actual change was far more severe than that post's vague phrasing would suggest. Simply linking to a Photobucket image from elsewhere would now require paying $100 a year, while embedding images on other sites would entail the $400 annual fee.

Photobucket's enforcement may be inconsistent, as some images I'd embedded elsewhere years ago remain viewable.

Failure to communicate

The company has since compounded its mistakes with some epically awful communication. After a few days of silence, its Twitter account surfaced to invite followers to Learn more about the latest changes at Photobucket.

Users were not amused, to judge from replies like Do you guys HONESTLY think this is going to work out in the end for you?

The company answered a query I sent to its tech-support email address (after finding no press-contact info on its site and having calls to its main phone number met with a recording advising I email support) by pointing me to a July 6 press release.
That document quotes CEO John Corpus blaming this shift on the rise of ad blockers and the Company's explosion of 3rd party hosting that generates zero revenue.

Photobucket didn't say how many people had signed up for its $400 plan since this revision. It doesn't seem to have been any more open with other news outlets; the Denver Posts story quotes the same statement I got.
Boom to bust

A decade ago, things looked much brighter for Photobucket. In early 2007 the traffic-measurement firm Hitwise acclaimed it as the web's top photo-sharing site, with 41% of the market, not long before the News Corp. (NWS) subsidiary Fox Interactive Media paid $250 million for the company.

Photobucket missed the rise of mobile apps, but its easy embedding still made it an easy choice for adding images to sites like eBay (EBAY) that limited their own picture storage at the time.

Two years later, News unloaded Photobucket for $60 million. In 2011, Twitter (TWTR) picked Photobucket to run its new photo-sharing feature then switched to an in-house system the next year.

Photobucket kept on touting its easy linking and embedding, suggesting in a 2013 e-mail that I let my photos out to mingle with your friends wherever they are on the web.

It still claimed 60 million unique visitors a month in 2015, although by then my occasional Photobucket use had long since stopped.

Ailing ads

Revisiting the site for the first time in years week made it painfully obvious how far management had gone to soak up ad revenue.

Not only are its photo galleries overrun with ads that obscure images and sometimes block the whole page, I even saw its terms-of-service page temporarily hidden by a tacky ad gallery.

If trying to monetize that unloveable legalese isn't a cry for help, I don't know what is.

It can be tempting to write off this sad saga as one company's mismanagement. But Photobucket isn't the only smaller site to find that online ads don't yield enough revenue while, as the music-sharing site SoundCloud just reported, subscriptions don't cover their bills either. Not all of these sites will be so easy to blame for their fates.

Giant companies like Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) may continue to prosper from online ads. But you have to wonder how much room the web will leave for sites without big-name brands behind them.

[Bud Brewster]

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I posted the message below on the Photobucket Facebook page today, and I sent the same message as an email to Photobucket Support with the title, "Please forward this to John Corpus".
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Dear Mr. Corpus,

Here's a simple lesson in basic economics. Please pay close attention, sir.

Smart kids with a Kool-Aid stand can sell each cup for 25 cents, and 120 customers will net them $30.

But stupid kids with a Kool-Aid stand try to sell each cup for $5.00, and hope that 6 customers will be dumb enough to pay it. They fail, of course, and they don't make a dime.

Mr. Corpus, please don't be one of the stupid kids. Why not reinstate all the former plans (Plus 50, Plus 100, and Plus 500), with hot linking available for ALL plans. No FREE hot linking anymore.

You'll sell a lot more Kool-Aid that way, and you won't bankrupt your Kool-Aid stand . . . the way your doing with this insane new policy. Think it over, sir. Otherwise I suspect you'll be asked to resign as CEO.

Sincerely,

Bruce
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[bulldogtrekker]

Photobucket replaces millions of images with 'ransom demand'

........Instead of paying the ransom annual fee, many Photobucket users are turning to other sites that still allow hotlinking.

Stampboards pointed out that users ???have no guarantee [Photobucket] will still be in business even in a month the way this disaster is rolling out.??? Instead of paying to remove the ??????WannaCry??? Gangster like $US400 cash Demand dial,??? the forum announcement suggested, ???someone at Photobucket with a brain will see the disaster they have unleashed, and back off totally, or in large part in the next week.???

A few other users have come up with workarounds, such as a Chrome extension that is supposed to show the actual embedded image instead of the error message and a fix that is supposed to convert blocked Photobucket images into a working URL.......


LINK for full story:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/3205765/internet/photobucket-replaced-millions-of-images-with-ransom-demand.html

[Bud Brewster]

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THIS IS BREAKING NEWS FROM ASF!

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to report that IMGUR web hosting is FAR superior to PhotoScrew-Ups in every way, and I've made surprising progress these last two days in transferring many of my own 13,000+ images from PB to the "free and unlimited" IMGUR account I create several months ago!

As I've been doing this, I've replaced my current PB jpeg codes on All Sci-Fi with the new codes from IMGUR. So far I've managed to completely replace my PB codes on the first 7 pages of the 47-page Forbidden Planet thread!

I've also replaced all the jpegs of my own artwork in Fan Art Gallery 1. I'll continue to do this throughout all the Art and Photo Galleries to safeguard them from Photobucket's self-destructive new policy.

Bulldogtrekker is doing the same thing with the many images on his popular Star Trek Cosplay photos forum and the Sci-Fi Babe Collection forum, using his own newly established IMGUR account!

The completion of our task might take us several weeks, but in the end All Sci-Fi will survive and continue to serve our loyal members.

Any of our members who are still using Photobucket but have not yet lost access to their pictures should switch to a different image hosting service immediately while they can still access their photos and transfer them before that mismanaged company goes completely out of business!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

THIS IS MORE BREAKING NEWS FROM ASF!

I'm delighted to report that I've discover a way to RESCUE blocked images on Photobucket for members like Orzel-w, Butch, and Eadie!

After trying anything and everything I could think of to get around Photobucket's blocks, I stumbled onto the fact that when find a blocked image by one of our members on their posts, I can right-click on the image and select "View Image", which takes me to the Photobucket page which of course holds the same "blocked" announcement jpeg displayed for that image on All Sci-Fi.

Then I simple hit "refresh" two separate times (sometimes just once), and . . . Viola'! The image appears! Please note however, that it still won't display on All Sci-Fi, so here's what I have to do to fix that.

I save the image to my computer and upload it to my FREE, unlimited-storage IMGUR account. Then I replace the damn Photobucket image code with the IMGUR code!

So, I'm working my way through All Sci-Fi's and looking for these ???



??? like the one that was on page 15 of the Forbidden Planet thread in one of Butch's posts . . . until I recovered his jpeg and restored it to THIS!



I urge anyone who has lost Photobucket images to set up an IMGUR account and use this technique to both restore your jpegs and set yourself free from Photobucket!
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

Please forgive my recent lack of activity, but I've been spending many hours every day replacing the Photobucket codes with Imgur codes (both my own and other members who need help), and it's a slow process!

Here's just a few of the "broken" jpegs I found and rescued from the clutches of the blood-sucking Count Photobucket and his greedy minions!









I promise I'll take a break today and do my part to keep All Sci-Fi lively and entertaining. Your help would be great appreciated, so please add a few of your own unique contributions to the board!

Bud
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Custer]

Well, I've set myself up with an imgur account - I guess I will get used to it, but the copied address for my first jpeg was, I think, a link to an actual page rather than the "img" one I'd been expecting... so I had to right-click the image itself (of the Galaxy first issue) and take the address for embedding from there. No doubt I will work out the proper way to do things eventually!